Comment by whatever1
7 days ago
This is the only promise that cryptocurrency held. Avoid government barriers. So we should celebrate the fact that it was not a complete scam.
7 days ago
This is the only promise that cryptocurrency held. Avoid government barriers. So we should celebrate the fact that it was not a complete scam.
I disagree. There's a tremendous amount of waste in the economy related to reconciling different companies' records of who owes what to whom and then getting that info to the bank and then hearing back from the bank about whether the debt was fully or partially paid and then relating that to whether the service continues to be rendered.
Moving from an accounts-receivable/accounts-payable model to a insert-coin-receive-service model would be a huge advantage.
It just hasn't happened because the vibes are wrong and it appears that they'll stay wrong for a while.
>Moving from an accounts-receivable/accounts-payable model to a insert-coin-receive-service model would be a huge advantage.
Why would the method of payment affect how you track accounts payable/receivable in your books?
Maybe there were better words I could have used there, sorry.
You can of course track it however you want, but the complexity of what you end up tracking explodes if you're operating on something like a monthly billing cycle. Especially if you have more than one financial institution with an opinion about whether money should/did get moved.
I've been involved with the maintenance of several billing pipelines and having to handle events like maybe the bank was only able to collect half of this person's bill but it took them a few days to let us know that, but we've already sent that money over here so now we' have this deficit and do we shut off their service over a deficit of just $5...
It's a nightmare that's totally orthogonal to the business that's being run. Nobody wants to be on the billing team, but it's viewed as a necessary evil. But I'm saying that it's an unnecessary evil. If you can very quickly settle up for practically nothing, then you can just build the app to withhold service for a few milliseconds until payment clears and then there's no debts to keep track of and resolve later. And having it on a public blockchain means that if you're collaborating with other companies over how the pie gets sliced, there's a single source of truth for how big the pie actually is.
> There's a tremendous amount of waste in the economy related to reconciling different companies' records of who owes what to whom and then getting that info to the bank and then hearing back from the bank about whether the debt was fully or partially paid and then relating that to whether the service continues to be rendered.
Is all that really a tremendous waste, in the days of databases and instant communication? How much waste are we talking about here? I'd wager a lot of money it's at least one order of magnitude less than the literal heat waste produced by validating bitcoin transactions. Crypto is much more wasteful.
> Moving from an accounts-receivable/accounts-payable model to a insert-coin-receive-service model
The monetary system isn't what's preventing this. You can't provide a service and also charge for it in the exact same instant. If I hire a contractor to renovate my bathroom, there's a ton of negotiation, possible disagreements about whether the work is "done" or not, payment deadlines, etc., and crypto vs. fiat currency changes none of that.
> You can't provide a service and also charge for it in the exact same instant.
Sometimes you can, and it's those cases that I'm thinking of.
But even when you can't, why not create the transaction up front and include the conditions under which it should or should not proceed at a later date? If you want a third party as a mediator, just in case, why not make that part of the transaction too? Why not ensure now, that the money you'll be paid later, actually exists and can't be spent on something else in the meantime?
So much becomes possible if both parties are on the same page yet neither had to build that page from scratch.
> How much waste are we talking about here?
Well there's all the business that doesn't happen because while I'm a bit curious about your service, I'm not curious enough to give you my credit card and trust your pinky-promise that you'll charge me like you said you would.
And then there's the business that doesn't happen because micropayments are required for the business model (many tiny credit card transactions being prohibitively expensive).
And then there's all the money that gets wasted when resolving disputes in court when mediators could've been bound to the transaction up front--mediators who are more familiar with the parties and the situations and who have access to a single source of truth about the nature of the disagreement rather than having to reconcile both versions of some "handshake agreement".
And then there's maintenance for all that billing pipeline code which is implemented over and over again--slightly differently by each company but rarely meaningfully so--which has to account for two worlds: one which creates debts, another which eliminates them, just to align the conjunction of those worlds to an arbitrary cadence (typically monthly) which has no correspondence with the product's usage. If you offload the accounting to public infra immediately, then you don't have to build and maintain infra which keeps both worlds in sync.
All told, I think it's quite a lot. As for the waste heat from bitcoin--yes, bitcoin is stone-age crypto. What we need for this probably doesn't exist yet.
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i agree smart contracts are the way forward, but you don’t need crypto or blockchain to implement them. You do need a trusted third party, to adjudicate when things go wrong.
We already have that. It's called courts.
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> It just hasn't happened because the vibes are wrong and it appears that they'll stay wrong for a while.
No. A civil society needs to be able to issue judgments that override transactions / seize assets. And therefore they cannot have automatons determining where the assets belong.
When criminals are caught with their hand in the cookie jar, we can't just shrug and say "gee I wish we had a way to get that money back."
I'm a big fan of bitcoin and to some extent cryptocurrency. I think it has real value. But I'm not deluded enough to think it can somehow replace all ledgers everywhere.
I'm not proposing that this all happen on an L1, of course you need some time for various parties to decide whether settlement should proceed. Nor am I saying that all ledgers everywhere would benefit from this change.
I'm just saying that many businesses would benefit (or become feasible in the first place) if the time between service-rendered and payment-pending were sub-second and built into the product and instead of relying on month-long-billing cycles. It would also be beneficial if the infrastructure for handling that process were common to both parties rather than having each of them track it separately hoping they agree on what is owed after the fact.
And pretty unique online irreversible near instant transactions. For this reason it was often the cheapest way to buy bullion online in a way that cleared in less than an hour, since most banks charge for a wire and credit cards (or vendor risk departments) charge high vendor premiums on bullion transactions.
It held also the promise of making me very, very rich.
How'd that work out?